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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23132962">When War Rode Alone</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darke_Eco_Freak/pseuds/Darke_Eco_Freak'>Darke_Eco_Freak</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anathema/Newt (mentioned), Aziraphale/Crowley (mentioned) - Freeform, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Untitled Goose (mentioned)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 07:34:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,677</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23132962</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darke_Eco_Freak/pseuds/Darke_Eco_Freak</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Anti-Christ speaks and the Universe listens. Chaos is Order is Natural, but War is nature too, Human Nature, and she doesn't forget.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Brian &amp; Pepper &amp; Wensleydale &amp; Adam Young (Good Omens)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>When War Rode Alone</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for the <a href="https://itsagoodomenszine.tumblr.com/">Ye Saga Continues Zine</a> based on the theme of Earthly Delights. A story focused on War and the little girl that defeated her.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The others forget, the rest of Them, but she does not. She is War and conflict is her nature; there is no power in this world that can break her nature. So, it only makes sense that every part of her fights against the new order Satan's no-longer-spawn forces on the world. She can feel it, every stroke and layer of it; like someone’s laying a blue glass filter over her memories and stealing away the blood-red sharpness of them.</p><p>Now her thoughts are tinged purple, now they are violet, but red always bleeds true.</p><p>War remembers the children, the three human children the boy surrounded himself with. A boy in glasses and scrawny limbs who believed in full stomachs and healthy bodies. Another boy, gangly on the cusp of adolescence, who abhorred filth. And girl, a fiery little girl, the kind who’d lead revolutions to fight for her peace, War remembers that one most of all.</p><p>They were odd children, strange, and War doesn’t understand them. She’d like to.</p><p>Perhaps the Anti-Christ child meant for the riders of the Apocalypse to stay gone forever, to never <em> become </em> again, but he can’t stem human nature. War wakes up in the Middle East, in the aftermath of a massacre, and beats the sand out of her hair as she considers the world as the child remade it. She's no more powerful now than she was before, and no weaker, so she’s been…stood down?</p><p>Not indefinitely because the End is coming, it’s always coming; there's still something to look forward to. She just doesn't have a set date for it, or orders to follow until said date finalises itself.</p><p>"Well, I am due some shore leave," she muses, picking her phone out of her sandy pocket, "Tadfield should be lovely this time of year.”</p><p>But finding the nowhere, no name town is...harder than it should be. War can find anyone on the planet, it's a gift of hers. If she thinks of them and presses an ear to the roaring torrent of human rage, she can usually pick out a single voice from the choir. This voice is quieter than most, still young, but War hears it and follows it all the way to some crossroads where an Angel and Demon are arguing.</p><p>War watches them for a while, keeping her distance as they bicker. The Angel wants to go slower, the Demon wants to go faster, and neither can remember which road is the right one. War smirks as they miracle themselves a map then takes a long way around to where her vague memories tell her Tadfield should be and doesn’t find it.</p><p>There’s only a field there, huge and green, and not a human for miles around. She sniffs, rolls her eyes, and cuts through the field to find another road. That road leads her straight to a pond where a goose is attacking a man in galoshes. He’s shouting, cursing up a storm, and War salutes the goose before she guns the engine and doubles back.</p><p>The world she remembered is far away and lilac, the last ride of the Apocalypse is smoke in her mind, and she should’ve expected that. The satanic brat wanted to be safe, didn’t he? He wanted avoid conflict and strife until he was all grown up so the universe would make it so much harder for <b> <em>her</em> </b> to find him than anyone else.</p><p>“I like a challenge,” she laughs, stopping at a crossroad that’s empty of Angels and Demons, and she listens.</p><p>In the quiet of the English countryside, there’s no roar of chaos to wade through, there’s pettiness and bickering and neighbourly fights and…a girl. War hears the girl’s voice prattling on about some childish thing and follows it all the way into a creek before she decides to do this the human way. The map she buys from a novelty store is just about unreadable but Tadfield's on it, circled in red by the helpful storekeeper, and then War's off again. Going much slower this time, squinting at every road sign she passes.</p><p>She has to stop twice to ask directions, first from an old geezer who calls her bedeviled and threatens her with a strange gun. Though she's almost insulted to call that thing a gun and leaves him coughing her exhaust before he can embarrass them both trying to fire it. The second time she finds a younger man peering at his car's overheating engine.</p><p>"Tadfield? You're not far, I live there now, and was on my way back from my mum's. You just go up the road then down your first left, not the right, that'd take you to the military base, then another left and you're practically there. Here Miss, could you give my girlfriend a message? She'll be in the garden—she likes to garden—of the big cottage in the square, can't miss it really. Could you tell her Dick Turpin broke down and be back by dinner?"</p><p>War burns rubber in her get away and drowns out the sound of the man asking, “Do you want to know why it’s called Dick Turpin?”</p><p>His directions are fairly straight forward, even if it meandered worse than Death’s stories about his granddaughter. War’s met her, a lovely girl who understands Duty and would be utterly mortified by the way her granddad goes on about her. Well, at least Death never tried to tell them a story about a car named Dick.</p><p>“This is it?” War scoffs, and that is it.</p><p>Tafield is…sleepy, tired and forgotten. The buildings are from another century, the people would fit in with plague-ridden peasants, and there <em> is </em> a woman gardening in the cottage in the square.</p><p>A witch from the look of her and War scoffs again. Tafield’s only protector is a garden witch? She’ll admit the run around to find the place was admirable, but the actual destination is a disappointment.</p><p>“Young lady! Young lady you cannot park there!” another old man is yelling, and War ignores him. Her steed will stay where she leaves it and can handle threatening mortals.</p><p>She wants to roam on her own two feet for a while and her bike’s engine is too conspicuous for that. So, she heads out on foot, listening to the girl boss her friends around and teach them about the inequalities of the world in the same breath.</p><p>There’s heat to those words, a passion that’s so familiar to her. She’s heard world leaders speak with the same embers in their mouths, smelt the same smoke on their words. Wars are fought by the grunts, soldiers, but they’re started by people who can breathe fire, like this girl.</p><p>War doesn’t remember how the girl defeated her, <em> why </em> the girl defeated her. She was the Anti-Christ’s friend; he would have given her anything she wanted in the world that came after. The girl could have spoken her words into reality, it would have been easy.</p><p>There’s no fence to hop and no signs saying keep out, but War feels the barrier as she forces herself through. It buzzes along her spine and sparkles in her fingers as she steps into the woods, following the sound of children. There’s an innocence in children’s voices, granted you’re too far to hear what they’re saying.</p><p>“I’ll be Prime Minister when I grow up,” the girl is saying, “I’ll abolish the monarchy and tax the rich.”</p><p>War stops, spotting the childishly made playhouse, and smiles. She’s seen children’s forts before, their castles and strongholds. Children love to protect their imagined worlds; they make up stories where they’re conquering kings and righteous rebels, and never realise they’re practising.</p><p>Humanity is born knowing her, they play her before they know her name, and when they’re grown, War is an old friend.</p><p>“Won’t people be mad about that, Pepper?” the gangly boy asks, pushing the tire swing harder and the girl kicks her legs to help.</p><p>“So what? We live in a society you know; we’ve all got to pull our weight to make it work,” the little Pepper girl scoffs as she soars up-up into the sky. Her curly hair bounces with the flounce of her head and her legs kick hard as she starts to fall-fall, and War smiles.</p><p>She can see this girl’s life, the rise and fall of it, she’s seen it so many times after all. There’s always idealism, expectations, of how the world should be and how it should work and <em> why </em> it isn’t doing that. They always <em> know </em> and they always want to be the one to change it.</p><p>They know so they try, oh do they try. They speak up, they speak out, they step on toes and rally all those people who just don’t <em> know </em>. They get bolder until they get beaten down or they find a chink in the system, a crack they can cling to and use to hoist themselves up.</p><p>They get power and they get heard and they <em> know </em>, so they keep going. Further and further, pushing the boundaries, saying what no one else dares say; soaring up-up. Then they plateau, reach that perfect weightless place where it’s there, it’s right there; everything they’ve always known. They can have it if they just…just reach for it.</p><p>And they do, they snatch and scramble and throw themselves at it. They kick their legs and make their friends push them because it’s right there and they can have it!</p><p>And then they <em> fall </em>. Then they come crashing down in a smash of bone and a splash of guts into War’s waiting arms. They know so much and they will fight to have it.</p><p>“I’d vote for you Pep,” the once-Anti-Christ says, and War turns her back on the children.</p><p>There is an End coming for this world; for this sleepy village and these odd children, and War cannot wait to ride to it. There is an End coming for this world and it will be marvellous, <em> delightful. </em></p>
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